What I’m Reading James Norcliffe

So many good books in my orbit recently, and so little time. Nevertheless, some simply compel the time: one a novel and four recent poetry books.

Kate De Goldi’s Eddy Eddy is a wonderful book, full of quirky characters including the eponymous hero, complex, intriguing and bittersweet, as they negotiate a few months in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes. The language is a constant delight, the plot compelling and the reveal, when it comes, at once surprising and right.

The Canterbury Poet’s Collective is a remarkable institution that has acted as a nursery for local talent for more than 30 years. One of its leading lights, the late John O’Connor is commemorated in the brand-new John O’Connor Award, given by the CPC for the best first book of poetry. The inaugural winner last year, judged by Elizabeth Smither, was Rose Collins with her My Thoughts Are All of Swimming. It is such a good book. Elizabeth said of it: ‘‘a beautifully ordered collection of consistently stunning poems’’ and I warmly concur.

I don’t, alas, speak Spanish but I’d love to be able to, given I have a Columbian son-in-law and two bilingual little grandsons. Another reason would be to be able to read in the original O me voy o te vas / One of us must go by the expatriate Mexican-New Zealand writer Rogelio Guedea. Luckily it has been adroitly translated by Roger Hickin, a fine poet himself. It’s a masterful sequence unlike anything else in New Zealand poetry: an honest and self-deprecating examination of the nature of a relationship.

Roger Hickin – as publisher at Cold Hub Press – brought out Michael Harlow’s new collection of prose poems Renoir’s Bicycle. It is vintage Harlow, full of imaginative leaps, erudition and wonder.

Finally, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s celebration of West Coast life and mores in After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad is such an evocative collection, irresistible to one like me with West Coast links.